Racism and the Republican Party

As noted in the prior post, racism is alive and well in today's Republican Party as are homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, and hate filled religion.  Indeed, these phenomenon are welcome it would seem given the GOP's failure to ever condemn such mindsets in any meaningful way.  Instead, the party panders more and more to these foul forces, driving decent people away in the process.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the GOP's problem with racism.  It is far past time that the leadership of the GOP cease their denial and eject hate merchants from the party.  Here are article excerpts:

Some time back, whenever a big racial controversy erupted, I trained myself into the habit of reading about it at FoxNews.com, just for the unbelievable comment threads. Let’s put it this way: If my friends and I went out to a bar and started playing a “let’s write the racist FoxNews.com comment thread” drinking game, our efforts couldn’t begin to approach what I read there.

[A] couple of years ago, Ailes & Co. got wise. Stories about race were, at least in my disheartened experience, closed to comments.

Fox acted, I recall, back in February 2012, when the thread on Whitney Houston’s death made even many conservatives a little jumpy. Here’s a taste: “Whitney is just an inferior lo w life ni gg er that needed to go, no tragedy, no loss…” “Any death is a tragedy you heartless bastard…” “not nignogs their death is a plus…”

[T]hese threads were poisonous, and they didn’t appear just on Fox. They’ve been all over conservative websites and have bled into some mainstream ones, too. Lord, the things I read in comment threads on North Carolina newspapers’ sites in their stories about the “Moral Monday” protests. Believe it or not, conservative readers, I don’t go flinging the r-word around loosely. But these comments, hundreds, thousands of them, were just thuggishly racist. Nothing else to call them.

Beyond these, we have numerous instances of low-level (and sometimes not so low-level) Republican Party officials—Republican Party officials—making racist jokes about Obama.

And now it’s supposed to be controversial when Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) says, as he did Sunday on CNN, that “to a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism”? Please. You have to be living a life of willed ignorance and denial to take issue with what Israel said.

Say you were a Republican political consultant. Would you ever in a jillion years suggest that your candidate take on racism within the GOP as a speech topic? You most certainly would not. Your candidate would be dead immediately. I mean metaphorically, but depending on the part of the country in which the speech was given, maybe literally, too. In other words, whether they’re 5 or 15 or 50, commenters like these are enough to prevent Republican politicians from ever addressing racism with any degree of candor. The cowardice on the GOP side on this issue is universal and always has been.We should not, then, even be debating whether what Israel said is true. Sadly, we shouldn’t even be debating why Republican politicians won’t discuss it.